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TODAY ON TAP ONLINE: WOMEN AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

Dana Goldsteinwrites that women at the Republican National Convention are accepting, and even approving, of Sarah Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy:

In conservative circles, the pregnancy news is more than just fine -- politically, it is playing like a dream among Republican delegates in St. Paul. The idea that the Christian right would have judged Sarah Palin a failure in imparting proper values to her sexually active daughter is silly -- a typical liberal misreading of contemporary conservative ideology. Though the religious right promotes abstinence-only sex education, vows of chastity, and dances at which prepubescent girls pledge their virginity to dad, conservatives do live in 21st-century America, just like the rest of us. They know teen sex happens. They just also happen to believe, against all common sense, that it can be eradicated.

And Sarah Posner has the latest on the religious right:

“Take that, feminists,” was Janice Shaw Crouse’s, director and senior fellow of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, response to Sarah Palin’s selection as GOP VP nominee. “For years the feminist movement has acknowledged for leadership only those women who embrace a radical agenda,” Crouse said in a statement. “Sarah Palin is pro-life, pro- marriage and pro-family. She is a woman who is balancing the personal and professional in admirable ways. … Here is a woman of accomplishment who brings a fresh face to traditional values and models the type of woman most girls want to become.”

The Beverly LaHaye Institute, however, typically disdains working mothers: A 2004 paper it issued, “The Symptoms of Parent Withdrawal,” claimed that “the feminists have achieved their goal: widely available child care to ‘free themselves of motherhood.’” In that particular disparagement of working mothers, Crouse charged that “we’ve known for years that the outcomes are undesirable when children spend too much time in day care.” The article concluded, “Instead of asking the typical question of what is best or more convenient for the adults, we must ask the serious question: ‘What is best for our children?’ Dr. Crouse’s answer: The best environment to foster a child’s intellectual development is one in which his or her mother is actively involved on a day-to-day basis; the best environment is the home.”